Bill Nye, the scientist and TV personality known to millions as "the Science Guy," criticized Christian groups aiming to inject creationist views and the bible into the classroom and urged people to rethink their convictions. (Photo: Creative Commons)

Bill Nye, the scientist and TV personality known to millions as "the Science Guy," criticized Christian groups aiming to inject creationist views and the bible into the classroom and urged people to rethink their convictions.

Christians who take the word of the bible as historical fact and argue that the Earth was created thousands, not millions, of years ago are known as creationists, and Nye said their beliefs are destructive to the U.S. education system.

"The Earth is not 6,000 or 10,000 years old," Nye told the Associated Press. "It's not. And if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs."

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However, despite Nye's strong convictions, a recent Gallup poll found that 46 percent of Americans believe God created humans 10,000 years ago.

"Thus, almost half of Americans today hold a belief, at least as measured by this question wording, that is at odds with the preponderance of the scientific literature," the organization wrote.

Nye said that bringing creationism into the classroom is a recipe for disaster.

"If we raise a generation of students who don't believe in the process of science, who think everything that we've come to know about nature and the universe can be dismissed by a few sentences translated into English from some ancient text, you're not going to continue to innovate," he said, according to Yahoo! News.

He also stressed that he's not worried about espousing such a polarizing view.

"I can see where one gets so caught up in this (debate) that you say something that will galvanize people in a bad way, that will make them hate you forever," he said. "But I emphasize that I'm not questioning someone's religion - much of that is how you were brought up."

But Ken Ham, a co-founder of Answers in Genesis, told Yahoo! News that the dating method used by scientists is inaccurate.

"We say the only dating method that is absolute is the Word of God," Ham said. "Time is the crucial factor for Bill Nye. Without the time of millions of years, you can't postulate evolution change."

That viewpoint worries Nye.

"What I find troubling, when you listen to these people ... once in a while I get the impression that they're not kidding," he said.